


Insert Inspirational Quote About Freedom Here

by thinlizzy2



Category: The Truman Show (1998)
Genre: Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Fame, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mental Health Issues, Post-Canon, References to Drugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-15 08:56:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13027614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinlizzy2/pseuds/thinlizzy2
Summary: Truman is technically free now, out of Seahaven and living in the Real World.  But that comes with challenges that no one ever prepared him to face and there are no writers to work out the happy endings anymore.





	Insert Inspirational Quote About Freedom Here

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coaldustcanary](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coaldustcanary/gifts).



Truman Burbank was shopping for groceries at the moment when he learned Marlon was dead. 

 

Not Marlon, he reminded himself. _Louis._ Louis Coltrane, a child actor whose initial claim to fame before he had become part of the team dedicated to one of the most expensive and wide-ranging deceits in modern history had been been endorsing a brand of cereal with extreme enthusiasm ("These O's make me say 'OOOOOOOHHHH!'" - Truman had watched the old commercials on YouTube about a million times by then). Louis Coltrane: a troubled man with a recurring drug problem and an almost impressive number of unresolved paternity suits against him. _That_ was who had died, in a motel room in New Jersey with a needle on his arm and bunched up balls of paper covered in illegible scribbles all around him. Truman could practically hear the voices of each of his fired therapists in his head reminding him that he had never known Louis, and that he had been forced to come to terms with the loss of Marlon - and childhood friendship and tree forts, baseball cards and six packs of cheap beer – many years ago. Still, he couldn't help clicking through all the links, absorbing ever lurid detail. 

 

If he was still Inside, learning of the death of a washed-up minor celebrity while shopping would have happened because he was scanning the tabloids in the grocery store checkout line, waiting for his turn and wondering if he had remembered every strange new product that Meryl had been weirdly insistent that he pick up. But on the Outside, both food and information came into his home via the computer. Because on the Outside, he sure as hell couldn't go out. 

 

He didn't know how Louis had handled it, the people who had condemned him for being a part of a deception that they had all adored, the people who had loved him for the sake of a person he wasn't. Or maybe he _did_ know how Louis had coped, and that was part of the problem. Every link he clicked made Truman's tongue twitch for a taste of one of the cold beers that he and the man who had pretended to be his closest friend used to drink during what had passed for hard times in the time Before. Truman had never tried anything stronger than a scotch on the rocks but it really couldn't that great a leap from reaching for a bottle to reaching for a spoon. Which is why he had promised Lauren - _Sylvia_ , there had never been a Lauren and why was that so much harder to remember than with all the others? - that he wouldn't let himself go down that particular path. And even though that promise was years old now, made back when they still spoke - when he still spoke to _anyone_ \- for some reason it still felt important to keep it. 

 

And anyway, it wasn't like he could order heroin on Amazon. 

 

Yet. 

 

Lost in his musings, he made the mistake of scrolling all the way to the bottom of one article. And there, as inevitable as ever, were the fucking thumbs. Headed with _**You May Also Like**_ no less, because Truman Burbank's life was nothing if not an endless parade of dramatic irony. Hannah Gill beamed up at him from her little box with her whitest, toothiest, most painful looking smile. Of course, Truman knew that he would not Also Like it. He hadn't even been Liking the first article. Nonetheless, he clicked on the space between her quietly desperate too-blue eyes. 

 

It wasn't as bad as it could have been. She seemed have torn herself free of her latest sex tape phase, though Truman knew well enough by then that there would be another one as soon as people stopped talking about her. She was going into the jungle, it was reported, to be on a reality show with other so-called celebrities. There was a lot of focus on the fact that on the last season of that program they made people eat kangaroo testicles, and so who knew what they would have in store for Hannah? Truman didn't even get close to the bottom of the article this time before he clicked back over the the supermarket website. But it wasn't a sense of self-preservation that steered him away from the news on Hannah. 

 

It was simply boredom. 

 

He didn't know Hannah Gill and from what was reported about her with rising and falling frequency he didn't find her overly compelling. He had known Meryl, at least a little bit. He had kissed her under the bleachers in high school, married her in the church the people he had believed were his parents had taken him to as a child, fucked her between carefully pressed sheets scented with some name-brand softener that he could no longer recall more times that he could count. He had considered having a child with her. And yet, as he watched the woman who wore her face desperately clinging to the shreds of her tattered fame, he just couldn't force himself to care. 

 

He did wonder what motivated her. It couldn't be money; everyone that had been anyone Inside had funds to buy everything they could ever want. Even Louis, with all his troubles, had kept enough to pump his veins full of the very best poisons. Truman himself lived extremely well off donations funneled his way by guilt-stricken former viewers, well-meaning would-be saviors and people who loved to talk about their own generosity on a variety of talk shows and vlogs, all intimating that they knew Truman in some way and all counting on the fact that he was too fucked up to emerge and deny that. As for Hannah, she had made millions for each season of their marriage with bonuses every time she hawked products over the dinner table or spread her legs in their marriage bed. One of the first things he had learned on the Outside was that she had been getting paid $10000 for every time the two of them had had sex. 

 

 _She raped you!_ Lauren had said, tears running down her face. _You didn't consent; you couldn't have. You didn't even know who she was. And everything was so carefully choreographed, it was like hunters luring a deer into a trap. I watched it all on TV, Truman; you have no idea the work they put into it. It wasn’t your fault._ Truman had gathered her her up in his arms, stroked her hair and tried to let her know he didn't blame her. Honestly, he had known she was right, but the situation, _all_ of it – literally the whole world – had been so bizarre that he hadn't known how to feel about it. So mostly, he had just felt nothing. 

 

Mostly, he still did. 

 

Fuck it! Not Lauren. _Sylvia._ He needed to find a way to stop doing that. 

 

There would be more, Truman knew, if he wanted to look for it. He'd been down that rabbit hole before, diving into the murky depths of the internet and emerging hours or days later, tired and somehow filthy. 

 

The woman he used to believe was his mother had found God, or maybe she thought she was God now - the reports changed from week to week. She was a "mega-reverend" with a "mega-church", and Truman had only the vaguest understanding of what all that involved and very much wanted to keep it that way. He wonders if his new atheism could possibly count as some delayed form of teenage rebellion but it probably wasn't possibly to rebel against people who weren't really your parents. 

 

The man he had believed was his father was a Congressman in Texas now and that was one of the few things that had happened since he Left that Truman found to be genuinely funny. 

 

But he didn't have the energy for any of that now, and there was nothing he could possibly discover about any of the people who had shared his life Before that would ever make him happy. He finished paying for his groceries and rubbed at his weary eyes. What he really longed for was a break, something fresh and new to clear his head and calm his heart. It was a feeling he knew damn well, one that he'd had on some level for as long as he could remember. He needed to get _away_. 

 

He opened up another tab.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide 2017, coaldustcanary!


End file.
